Due to technology, we now live in a world of transparency and everyone letting you know what they are up to on social media. Someone tweeting they got a bagel before they went to work or someone instagramming that they just got engaged. We have even created trends in ways we can elaborately celebrate news like the massive gender reveal baby showers that are shared online. All of us love to share our lives because it is uplifting and we can feel proud of ourselves for any milestones. On the other hand, when others do share their lives we feel like we have to compare or value our own lives based on other people’s success.
Luckily, times have progressed in terms of certain milestones that society THOUGHT we all had to reach in order to be classed as successful. Before, it was the order of: school, work, marriage, children, happy families and then retire. These certain points were also usually detected by an age, getting married at 25 and children before the mother reached 30. Oh and God forbid someone had children before marriage! Some people still think this should be the perfect timeline to reach full happiness but no. Time is a social construct. We have created this illusion that there is a deadline to certain things being met. That everyone had to meet their ‘soulmate’ in their 20’s and expected to have their lives and career figured out as a teenager. When people do share their successes however, we should be happy for them as jealousy and bitterness never helped anybody. Spreading joy and positivity should be an aim in everyone’s lives. But, just because someone has done something at this certain point of their lives, that does not make you any less successful within your own life. Everyone has different life lessons that need to be met and success cannot be measured universally, success is defined by your interpretation.
Now I am not saying fuck all your deadlines and miss work tomorrow or blow off that essay (unless you thought that was beneficial for you), as those do have deadlines that need to be met to reach another milestone, But what I am saying is some people might have reached these milestones later in life and that is okay. Society’s belief in success with having a family, a house and a stable job usually through a university degree is not the case for everyone and that is also okay. No one needs to be married, have children or even live in a house to feel successful. But if you do want marriage and children that is still great because having children is probably a beautiful feeling (I would not know personally but from hearing mothers describe their children shows how much love and joy there must be). Success could be living in a campervan and travelling from city to city, seeing extraordinary landscapes and being at one with nature. Success could just be getting through the day without taking a nap or crying. As I said in my previous blog post about being in the present, which you can see here: https://punnyillustrations.wixsite.com/website/post/why-do-we-overthink
Just considering the successes you want to achieve in day to day life is much less overwhelming and that way you can focus more on what you do want for yourself. An example of someone who honestly you can tell just loves what they do and began their career in what society considered a ‘later’ time is Samuel Jackson. The actor was 46 when he played his role as Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction. No one focuses on what he did previously or judges when he started this career as we now all know Samuel Jackson as an incredibly successful actor in multiple films. Majority of the time, when someone is flourishing in their industry people do not tend to focus on how old they are or how long it took them but just respect that they are there and is someone to aspire to. It is never too late to start something new, change your mind or experiment on something you are intrigued by. Society has even negatively labelled a change in career as a ‘mid-life crisis’ to shame you into leaving your ‘stable’ and money-churning job instead of focusing on your happiness and what you actually want to do.
The main point I wanted to clarify was that life will not punish you for not reaching a goal at a certain age and neither should you. Ironically, the people that tend to pressure others asking “So when are you going to get a boyfriend/girlfriend?” “When are you getting married?” “When you have children you should do this...”, they were probably pressured themselves and feel that everyone has to follow the same life path.
You are the leader in your own life! No one can dictate what makes you feel successful or happy.
This post was created for Mental Health Awareness Week 2020 by the Mental Health Foundation with the theme being kindness. I will be posting every day this week to depict different perspectives on how we can kinder to others and ourselves.
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